The research will investigate the way in which individuals represent and employ their expectations about a complex interpersonal relationship, marriage. Anthropological methods for eliciting verbal report, and reconstructing an underlying conceptual structure which fits or reproduces such reports, will be employed with a sample of married informants. The research objective is the description and formal modeling of the higher-level knowledge which governs human cognitive performance. The model which emerges from the research should describe the way in which expectations about marriage are represented, and account for the role of these representations of expectations about this interpersonal relationship in its everyday enactment. It is argued that other kinds of everyday knowledge are organized around representations of expectations, and that therefore the model developed in this research will have implications beyond the structure of knowledge about marriage and other interpersonal relationships, for the structure of all knowledge. Marriage has been selected for investigation because it is a widely-experienced, long-term, emotionally salient, and culturally elaborated relationship; hence it is expected to be a rich source of data about how people represent and employ their expectations.